The cloud computing environment is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further abstracted by a cloud layer, thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical compute engines, servers and devices, device memory, and storage devices.
When a “potentially-problematic” image has to be installed on a virtual (or physical) machine, the installation and execution of such an image can create a security exposure to the enterprise. The pervasiveness of cloud computing creates a significant issue in managing a large quantity of images that get created by users who utilize them. Specifically, this can result in administrative security challenges. For example, the images that are created on persistent physical media as dormant images for an unknown length of time will likely miss one or a plurality of patches, updates, fixes, and upgrades, some of which are critical enough not only for the image's stability by itself, but also for the stability of the entire network. In recent years, multiple examples of security vulnerabilities have been discovered in enterprise applications, operating systems, and web browsers and other software that may make up or be a part of an image. Such vulnerabilities may allow malicious programs and perpetrators to manipulate the image content, and even more dangerously, hijack such images to inflict serious and damaging effects on the enterprise network.